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Can your business stand out like the animatronic unicorn in the Squatty Potty video?

Now days it’s imperative more than ever that you build your business to really stand out from the pack like a magical unicorn.

The trick is to establish a USP (unique selling proposition) that truly differentiates your product(s) or service(s) from your competitors.

Obviously it’s a lot easier said than done.

But one thing is certain and it’s when you figure this part out of your business it’s like a spotlight from heaven suddenly shines down on you for the world to see.

However as everything gets more and more saturated figuring how to be different becomes increasingly more difficult to achieve.

Sometimes being the ugly duckling has it’s advantages.

Contrary to popular belief ugly can be a beautiful thing. Just ask the companies who have massive success by pivoting in an uncharted direction that took a lot of risk similar to when Columbus set sale on the ocean’s blue in search of undiscovered land.

Selling the dream…

Here’s a few ways you can set the bar and put your business at a whole other level. Once you figure out how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors the sooner you will see just how effective it can be in creating more sales.

Offer exceptional service

This is the most common method, however it’s also typically the normal route most service based businesses go. The kick here is that if there’s already a competitor in your industry with that claim to fame then you’re SOL and you better figure out another way.

Charge differently

This can be applied in nearly infinite ways, you just need to put on your thinking cap and devise a plan. How often have you discovered a product or service with several companies to choose from and you chose the one who best fit your budget? This is a great way to carve out your own piece of the pie.

Reduce or remove any barriers

If you operate a business with perceived risk you can help reduce or eliminate it by offering a no questions asked guaranteed refund or setting up a trial offer or even a better allow them to use the service and pay nothing up front.

Own a specific attribute

This could mean you’re the easiest, cheapest, fastest, or whatever else you can think of as long as it means something to the consumer and has a strong association with your brand.

Be an innovator in your industry

Be the first to market, top seller, biggest, best, etc. in your niche.

Specialize in one specific niche or skill

You can set your business apart from all others if you can specialize in a completely unique way. However it’s becoming increasingly harder and harder to use this one these days as it’s been quite common for most businesses to go this route. You really have to get more creative to find a way to stand out.

Origin story

This all comes down to your consumers being able to relate and connect on a level that’s way more personal than your competitors. I’m sure there’s a few businesses out there you connect with because of some story behind their company.

Opposites attract

If everyone in your industry is going one way, try to figure out a way to go completely in the opposite direction to really set yourself apart from the pack.

Create a persona or add a celebrity

You see it all the time, however you may not recognize it because it’s become such common place. But almost every successful business has some sort of mascot or personality. Think about Geico with the Gecko or how about Aflac with the duck, I could go on and on but you get the picture.

It’s not easy to differentiate your business from your competitors, but when you do you’ll reap the rewards of all that hard work.

In the comments below, please let me know how you’re differentiating your business from your competitors.

Unfortunately as much as I’d like to I cannot divulge all of his trade secrets here in this post.

But let me just say what whether you work with service contractors or not, this training is a must have for anyone who wants to get their client’s listed in the Google 3-pack.

I’ve personally gone through his training and it’s by far and away the most comprehensive step-by-step instructions I’ve ever seen about the methods that will ultimately lead you to getting your client’s listed in the Google 3-pack.

If you’ve had success getting your own clients in the Google 3-pack please leave a comment below and let me know what’s worked best for you.

And I don’t even mean from an aesthetics point of view, but rather they just don’t convey what the business is really about or what they offer (products or services).

Sometimes keeping things extremely simple and straight to the point is far better than having the latest and greatest bells and whistles.

Most local businesses suffer from not connecting with their intended audiences.

You know the old saying, “people must know, like and trust you.”

To be perfectly honest most websites miss out on two of those three things.

Local businesses fail to capitalize on building trust and when you build trust then they typically like you.

The only thing about 99% of all local business websites do is let you know what they do.

That presents a problem because now they’re just like their competitors.

Sometimes your best unique value proposition comes from something as simple as allowing your audience to connect with you.

So how do you get your audience to connect with you?

You can achieve this by simply having a page, typically the home page, that shares your client’s story.

The client’s story can be comprised of a hero (the business owner), photos and bios of the staff, photos of the office (inside and out), testimonials, location, and hours of operation.

All call to actions should direct them to sales page that removes all distractions and overcomes objections ultimately leading to phone call or to purchase a product/service.

Then I also recommend setting up a separate blog site where I post relevant articles and advertorials featuring the client’s products/services.

This is a great way to drive traffic organically through SEO and when running Facebook ads by providing a ton of value to prospective consumers.

I typically refer to this type of website as a “3-page sales funnel”. The advertorial is our bait with links to the home (story) page. From there once a person clicks on any of the call to actions they’re sent to the sales page.

I hope this post has inspired you to offer sales funnel websites to your clients. If so, please leave a comment below and let me know what you think about sales funnel websites.

Business funding is the same idea as a traditional small business loan.

Since the last recession about 10 years ago, banks just don’t like to take the risks on small business loans like they used to.

If you try to get a small business loan you’ll have about a 20% success rate from your bank.

Most small businesses have no idea where to turn when it comes to getting a loan for their business.

This is where you come in…

I’m sure you’ve heard it before, you know the story, “I’m sorry, but I can’t afford your services because I simply cannot invest that much into my digital marketing.”

Now if you were to help that business secure funding not only would you earn a commission from the lender, but you could also then land them as a client and have them pay you what you deserve to provide digital marketing services for them.

It’s a win-win proposition!

In fact if you look at it like this you’re actually double-dipping. You’re getting that commission from the lender and getting paid by the business to help them grow.

How sweet is that?

The best part to all of this is there’s exactly no risk to you.

And you don’t need to be licensed or anything like that to refer businesses to these non-bank lenders.

Oh and did I mention that about 8 out of 10 businesses who apply get approved?

Yep you read that right, nearly 80% of businesses get approved by these non-bank lenders.

That’s huge!

That means you just need to find potential leads who are willing to take on a loan to improve their business.

When working with offline clients often they are in need of cleaning up the negative reviews left by disgruntled clients/customers or sometimes it’s from former employees.

Whatever the case may be it’s spells bad news for the business in question.

So how do you remedy a ton negative reviews?

For one you need to find out what commonalities all of the negative reviews.

Once you can pinpoint it to one particular issue, you need to address it with the business owner to see if it’s something that will be a continuing to rear it’s ugly head or it’s something has already been resolved.

At that point a great way to improve reviews is to capture the negative reviews before they’re made public and posted to Google My Business, Yelp, or anywhere else where they will affect the business.

You must keep in mind that no matter how well a business is run and the quality of the products or service they provide are, there’s always a naysayer.

One of the best ways to help a business build back up it’s reputation is to have it’s clients/customers leave 4 and 5 star reviews to help offset the 1 and 2 star reviews.

But how?

Well one way to do it is to have a method in place that allows everyone to post their honest reviews where any reviews posted with less than 3 stars can be immediately sent directly over to the business owner where they can then reach out to the client/customer and remedy the situation in hopes of that person re-reviewing the business and if the resolution is positive will then lead them to post a 4 or 5 star review.

Of course any 4 and 5 star reviews would be posted to the business website and on sites like Google My Business, Yelp, etc.

Obviously this is a lot easier said than done.

That is until now…

My good friend Neil Macpherson just released a product called WP Review Machine and it gives you all the necessary tools to pull this off without a hitch.

Without going into too much detail in this post, I will just say that it solves all the problems I outlined above and makes offering reputation management services a breeze.

I’d love to hear what you’re doing and how you’re currently handling your client’s online reputation by leaving a comment below.

When you own and operate a small business whatever it may be you usually are a jack of all trades so to speak and do everything yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, doing everything yourself definitely has it’s benefits such as you know the quality of your own work and can decide if or when it gets done.

Of course the down side is that you only have so much time in the day and eventually you just don’t have enough time to get everything done.

That’s when you need to hire someone or someones to take some of the work load off your shoulders.

Usually when you’re a small business you can only afford so much for an employee’s salary and that’s where a Virtual Assistant comes into play.

You can usually outsource the work you need them to do and get someone from the Philippines or India for pennies on the dollar through a site like UpWork.com or OnlineJobs.ph.

I can personally attest to having success hiring a VA from the Philippines and it cost me next to nothing which is the best part.

But sometimes it’s hard to get the most bang for your buck so to speak.

It’s relatively easy to find and hire someone, but it’s not always easy to convey the work that needs to be done.

One way I found to make this as efficient as possible and to ensure your VA is busy doing their work and you’re getting what you’ve paid for is by creating training videos which may sound difficult or time consuming but really are not.

In fact the best way to do it is get yourself an account with Screencast-O-Matic and use it to record your screen.

First and foremost create yourself a quick list of activities you need your VA to do.

Once you have that list the next time you need to do that task yourself simply turn on the screen recording software (Screencast-O-Matic) and just talk over what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

That way you’re killing two birds with one stone by completing a task that needs to get done anyway, but now you have also created a training video (in real time) that can be used over and over again for all of your employees.

These training videos do not have to be perfect by any means. They definitely don’t need an intro or an outro and most likely will not require any video editing whatsoever.

This will ensure your VA or employee knows exactly what to do and how long it will take to complete the work you want them to get done.

I’m about to give you maybe the most valuable piece of content you’ll read all year.

No joke!

Pick a niche, any niche and let’s roll!

In a nutshell, you’ll be creating an irresistible front-end offer utilizing the free plus ship model to drive leads and sales.

Once the traffic hits your front-end offer they will be presented with a “bump” offer to add a monthly newsletter for just $4.99/mo.

If they take it with your initial front-end offer then you’ve killed two birds with one stone which is as good as it gets.

If they don’t take it with your front-end offer then they’ll be represented with it again as an up-sell on the very next page in your sales funnel.

If they pass on it at that point you will follow-up through emails that are highly focused on the features and benefits of your monthly newsletter and will hopefully capture them as subscribers down the road.

The trick to this entire process is being able to find the perfect front-end offer that converts well enough to either break even on the amount of money you’re paying to drive traffic to your sales funnel or of course to make a profit.

The key here is to find a product that fits your niche to a “T” for as low a cost as possible.

This usually achieved best by looking for your product at AliExpress.com.

Once you find your super sweet and totally irresistible front-end offer you’re now in business.

Don’t worry about creating your first monthly newsletter until you’ve found a high converting front-end offer and until someone or someones have actually signed-up for the monthly newsletter.

When both of these criteria are met, then you can focus your efforts on developing the first issue of your newsletter.

Now your newsletter does not have to be 100% unique.

There’s no need to create all the content yourself or from scratch to make this worth the $4.99/mo.

But rather curate the content to A) make your work easier and B) give people exactly what they want.

This newsletter should contain 5-10 topics in the niche that’s of some sort of value to the reader.

The newsletter will usually be about 2-3 pages in length and should have a nice professional look and feel to it in PDF format.

The retention rate on this type of subscription model is so high due to the fact that the price point is so low.

It’s just like your Netflix subscription of $7.99, now $9.99, where you don’t think twice about cancelling it ever if you never use it.

Also by providing a low monthly fee, the barrier to entry is reduced to almost no barrier since it’s so ridiculously reasonable.

Another trick of the trade to retain subscribers is tease upcoming content and/or to offer free products or giveaways once a month to your subscriber base.

Once you get this sales funnel dialed in it can easily make you more and more money each month as you’ll be adding more and more subscribers to your newsletter than you’ll be losing.

This is truly a sustainable online business model that doesn’t require a lot of work and can give you the laptop lifestyle you maybe seeking.

So will you be using this monthly newsletter business model to diversify your income stream?

The best way to land clients is to build trust and there’s no better way to do it than to create an irresistible offer that they cannot refuse (and if they do they’re bat sh*t CRAZY!).

Now there’s several ways to go about this, in fact I create a product a few years ago called Offline Marketing Evolved CAM (Client Acquisition Method) and it was centered around offering a PLR (private label rights) book that was roughly 175 pages in length or so that was completely generically written for a specific niche i.e. chiropractors, dentists, real estate agents, etc.

I would basically take a few minutes to brand the book on the potential clients behalf so that they could see what it would look like with their picture on the cover and their name as the author.

I then would use a print on demand service and drop off a physical copy at their office.

This tactic would all most always get me an opportunity to sit down with the client and talk about all the things I could do to help them out with their digital marketing needs.

Like I previously mentioned there are several ways to skin a cat so to speak…

Recently a Digital Marketer by the name of Lee Cole just put out a product to make it brain dead simple to offer writing press releases for potential clients.

Whether either of those options tickle your fancy or not…Not to worry there’s plenty of other great foot in the door strategies to offer.

Another great idea is to offer a super simple and scalable service such as offering to post content on a potential client’s Facebook fan page.

Once you have content created for once niche you can easily rinse and repeat with the only work you need to do is schedule out the page posts.

OK, ok you twisted my arm and I’ll give you one more strategy…

Last, but certainly not least you could offer to write up monthly newsletters for a potential client.

Again this is a completely scaleable service because you write 12 newsletters in one niche you can offer it over and over again to as many potential clients in that niche as you can find.

These last two ideas are great because you can charge as little as $99 per month to provide each of them so it makes it a no-brainer for the client to say yes while providing the business with a ton of value that they could never get anywhere else for that little bit of money.

Are we doing all of this just to make $99 per month per client?

Absolutely and unequivocally NO.

What we’re trying to do here is build trust while providing value so your potential clients can get to know, like and trust you.

Once they know, like and trust you can you easily up-sell them on other services you provide and turn them into a $1000 or even a $1500 per month client.

Obviously this is this just the tip of the iceberg and you can think of many, many more ways to provide some sort of offer/service that can land you a client.

Please let me know what foot in the door strategies you’re using to land clients in the comments below.

Local Social Growth Secrets

10K Local Social System

Welcome!

Hi, I'm Kerry Knoll and welcome to Growth Hack Mindset. I'm a Digital Marketing Consultant and I help local businesses.

It didn't take me long to realize that local businesses need assistance with their digital marketing. So I created Growth Hack Mindset to be a resource for those who are looking to build their own Digital Marketing Agency so they can help local businesses as well.